One of our clients wrote in asking for a course outline for Skid School. Skid School founder Sandy Stevens replies:

 I developed Skid School Driver Skills Development Program to focus on emergency skills in the hands-on portion of the class, and on a general knowledge of vehicle behavior and equipment safety parameters as they relate to the driver's and the vehicle's  preparedness for handling the kind of emergency response that we are teaching and practicing in the hands-on portion of the training.

It is derived from the program we provided to the Vermont Police Academy for 30 years, and that we currently provide to the insurers of municipalities for police, fire and EMT drivers as well as other municipal employees in the Northeast.

All of our hands-on drills are designed to provide practice and  build expertise in skills that are required for safely negotiating predictable emergencies such as a deer in the road or being forced out of your lane. By their very nature, the emergency response required in these drills cannot be practiced anywhere but in a safe, controlled and obstacle-free environment that is large enough to enable us to train at speeds that approximate actual  highway conditions at the time of the emergency. This is why it is so difficult for us to find adequate training space in an area that would be more convenient for Skid School participants. Compromising on safety parameters is not an option for us. 
 
The hands-on drills are as follows:
 
Panic Stop
Drivers stop from 55mph in a straight line in the shortest possible distance. Those drivers who learned to drive before ABS are surprised to find that steering control is much more easily maintained in a vehicle with ABS than it was in a vehicle that could possibly lock its brakes under those conditions.
 
Serpentine
The serpentine links a number of turns together in rapid succession. It is a technically difficult drill that requires considerable practice. The payoff is that when a driver swerves to avoid a deer or other obstacle suddenly in his path, the practiced response of smoothly linking the turn that returns the driver to his lane after the initial swerve is the result of practice and conditioning that separates a trip into the trees or a spin-out on the shoulder from a near-miss.
 
Emergency Lane Change
Intersection crashes are the most common type of serious crash, and are the most likely to produce serious injuries and multiple-vehicle property damage. Having a go-to, instinctual procedure that uses 100% of the car's capacity for avoidance is a must for every driver, and with the active safety equipment required on today's vehicles, it is a procedure that is within every driver's grasp. Sadly, most of those crashes happen with less than 35% of the car's potential for avoidance having been used. The emergency lane change drill combines the braking and steering skills of the other two drills, and adds the element of surprise. Entering a lane of cones at highway speed and approaching a cone barrier, the instructor signals with a light mounted on the dash which direction the driver is to swerve around the barrier while braking. The timing of the instructor's signal compels the driver to react in a manner that replicates the reaction time available in a true road emergency. Practice and repetition soon make this dramatic maneuver feel routine.
 
Tailgating
This final drill is both a warning and a pathway to a safer future if its message is taken to heart. The drill gives everyone the experience of having the driver in front of them slam on the brakes from a common city speed, in this case 40 MPH, when the following driver is following at a distance the group has agreed represents common following distance. There is clarity in the performance of the group.
 
Discussion topics are:
 
Orientation
Hands and seating position
Brakes and ABS
Hydroplaning
SUV handling characteristics
Stability control
The vehicle dynamics of the emergency lane change
Distracted driving

I hope this is helpful and responsive to your request. If there is anything else I can provide, please don't hesitate to ask.
 
Best Regards,
 
Sandy Stevens

Dear Sandy, 
   My16 year old son just got his license. He's a very good driver but unlike my 18 year old daughter when she was first driving, he is very confident in his driving ability despite his relative lack of driving experience. 
   My daughter attended your skid school for teens and we feel it was very good for her. We'd like my son to attend as well, but are a little concerned that it could contribute to his already strong sense of confidence. Do you think this program would be beneficial to him and not encourage him to become over confident? 

Sandy answers:
I've been thinking about your email for a couple of days. This issue is the Gordian knot of my career. I can teach them how to miss the deer, but to do so I have to teach them how to access 100% of the car's potential for avoidance, which provides them with skills that might very well be applied in the unpredictable and uneven manner that is characteristic of those years when the brain is evolving into its adult state.
 
I re-read an article, "The New Science of the Teenage Brain" from the October 2011 National Geographic, and from which I shall quote freely, which has rather an upbeat take on this process, They are saying that adolescence isn't a problem; that the "...angst, idiocy, haste, impulsiveness, selfishness, reckless bungling" that we see don't characterize adolescence. They are just what we notice because they are so annoying or put our children in danger. The unique characteristic of humans is that we are an evolving species, and the proof that the negatives that we attach to this period of transformation are not in fact dysfunctional traits is that they would never have survived natural selection if they were. The article's "adaptive adolescent theory" casts adolescents as "exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creatures wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside."
 
Laurence Steinberg, developmental psychologist specializing in adolescence at Temple University, points out that even the biggest risk-takers, 14- to- 17-year-olds, use the same basic cognitive strategies that adults do. They reason their way through problems as well as adults, and fully recognize that they are mortal. So why do they take more chances? He says it's because they weigh the risk vs. reward differently; they value the reward more than adults do. This sounds like what you're afraid of with your son. He presents as skilled, capable and confident, but you fear that in an unforgiving environment like driving, where he is cast into a maelstrom where everything is happening at 90 ft/sec, there is no natural selection process in his thousands-of-years-old DNA that provides him with instinctual wisdom in this brave new environment of our own recent creation, where trial-and-error is not an option.
 
I can't make this decision for you, but I can wholeheartedly support whatever you choose, because you know him best and you know what we do. I will say that if you bring him, come with him, take part in all the discussions, talk to him between drills, insist that he get every single thing he can out of the training. One of our instructors almost lost his life the second day he had his license. Another is an ER doctor. Another is a police officer who suffered a TBI when hit by a car in the line of duty. They all send the right message, but we both know that that doesn't mean it will be heard. But I will say you are asking exactly the right question at exactly the right time.
 
Best Regards,
 
Sandy Stevens

This is a great refresher for some of the most important takeaways from Skid School. It's also a good introduction into what we cover at our schools.

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